{"id":10067,"date":"2018-05-16T04:20:14","date_gmt":"2018-05-16T09:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hilbertthm90.wordpress.com\/?p=10067"},"modified":"2022-06-21T12:23:38","modified_gmt":"2022-06-21T17:23:38","slug":"why-it-works-primer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amindformadness.com\/2018\/05\/why-it-works-primer\/","title":{"rendered":"Primer: Why it Works"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
A series in which I oversimplify one concept from a work of literature to make you a better writer.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Time travel sucks as a genre. It’s a bit of a pet peeve of mine. Yes, the whole genre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Everyone knows about the grandfather paradox: if you travel back in time and kill your grandfather before he conceives with your grandmother, there would be no you to go back in time and kill him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But many people misinterpret the paradox as being about specific inconsistencies you can trace, when in fact it’s more of a chaos theory issue: the tiniest change of the past could radically change the “present” in unforeseeable ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This could happen if the person goes to the past and doesn’t even physically interact with anyone. Merely being seen by a person could alter their day, which leads to change after change after change…<\/p>\n\n\n\n Pretty much every book or movie I’ve seen with time travel has been terrible. It either ignores this problem, has the problem but tries to explain it in an unsatisfactory way, or it succeeds in explaining it but destroys the story in the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I honestly believe no one should ever write a time travel story because it’s going to be a disaster no matter how hard you try. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It’s not worth the effort. If I ran an SF magazine, my first rule of submissions would be: no time travel stories (rule 2 would be: no first-contact stories).<\/p>\n\n\n\n But then we wouldn’t have Primer<\/a><\/em>, which actually kind of works.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTime Travel<\/h2>\n\n\n\n